Short Abstract:
Among academic reports and analysis’ within the time-period of the pre-eminent to domineering role think tanks play in politics, there is an unequivocal consensus: conservative organizations ruled the early think tank landscape. This theme is supported, generally, by archeological artifacts—we can delineate these as ineluctable vassals or vessels of cultural change. The methodology (in which I am meaning the ideological constraints of any conceptual heuristic beyond archeology) of the techniques employed in disparate political analysis will be the key focus. In simpler terms, what we learn from current analytics and political landscapes backtracks and brings into awareness facets of mechanisms previously thought to be “unthinkable” in earlier variants of society. However in doing so we are faced with an imperative to demarcate between what can be held accountable and what cannot. In this sense, there will always be an implication with “how much agency is actually allotted to political actors in history and in us?” To do so is to divide history into institutional categories and subject formal agency into linguistic theories. To demonstrate we will show how this can be formalized through discussion of think tank emergence within American society.
Introduction:
Following in the wake of two studies, I will illustrate how we can divide current think tanks analytics (on conservative dominance) into two categories: linguistic theory and agency. Without an adequate theory of semantics, boundary lines (to echo Medvetz), and historical significance we cannot look at agency. To talk about how individuals are motivated, equally, by language we must show why one ideology prevails over another. Doing so lets us avoid the common pitfalls of an a-temporal “metaphysical” manifestation of “human motivation”. Some might retaliate to this historiography (such being to isolate temporal materializations of written idioms imbed in historical operations) showcasing that it would simply illustrate violence and power becoming the primary motivators underlying linguistic coherence, i.e.: language soon becomes a quantification game—of who can signal the most to ever increasing parties—going so far as to suggest we can never develop a formal theory of language (as it leads to hierarchal paradoxes); of which the quantification of human desire into societal capitals leaves us devoid of any “freedom” language gives us and the agency that stems from that.
I will rebut that to imagine or establish a theory of language is to understand and furthermore demonstrate what it “means” to use language on the small scale; further even, if we are to understand agency we must emphasize traditional boundaries, that of which can only be done through history and its institutions. Establishing a metalanguage is categorically different than if we are to inquire, “does talking about metalanguage give us more or less freedom?”
Stefancic and Delgado’s “No Mercy”
Main Themes:
Most of “No Mercy” is an archeological dig surrounding conservative “successes”. The movements are: Official English; Proposition 187; IQ, Race, Genetics; Affirmative Action; Welfare; Tort Reform; Campus movements. The main thesis surrounds conservatives winning “wars of position” over the last few of decades.
Framing Devices:
Antonio Gramsci: Marxist, developed wars of positioning versus wars of ‘maneuvering’.
Positioning is ideological, whereas maneuvering is direct action against the opposing party.
The main idea is that conservatives, through the guise of ‘defending values’, devise counter attacks on opponents to society. Rather than try to implement changes to culture, they emphasize the increased structuring of it and the layering of hierarchy.
Specific conservative actors are usually key figures bouncing from one movement to the next. Generally, the whole movement focuses on a ‘single issue’ for a couple of years to a decade.
Furthermore, conservatives have established lines of communication and ways of climbing in organizations for the youth. The practicality of grooming the young to be established champions in the ‘political war' for preserving cultural ideas has led to conservative success over the years in establishing dominance.
Thomas Medvetz’ “Think Tanks in America”
Main Themes:
Precedent:
The three academic views of think tanks (pluralism, elitism and institutionalism) all suffer from fatal flaws that one of the other three excels in. Pluralism establishes cognitive autonomy but ignores elite power structures; elitism deprives agency, intellectual viability, and institutional reliance but establishes the correct dynamics between elites and their corollaries; institutionalism tends to favor conceptual adherence between actors in “epistemic communities”, or agents with a favored goal in mind, however, ignores the necessity of social and literal capital in the equation.
Linguistic devices:
Drawing from Wittgenstein’s “family of resemblances” Medvetz describes the “cloud” that has surrounded think tank as a word within culture, from it’s first use as a term to describe the mentally ill who has “lost the plot”, to the description of organization that develops intellectual capital. He later develops this into “field theory” with four polarized quadrants and a map of four “descriptions” of an organization relationally to surrounding organization.
He revisits this later in the differences between typologies and topologies. He means this in a semi literal way, as there was also an actual geographic coherence between “types of think tanks” in Washington. As was there inter-transition where think tanks would “send each other members”, strengthening the nexus agents and their experience.
Further then, is the difference between universalistic conceptions of capital and immediate forms of capital. The addition of the temporal dimension is imperative here, as it delineates, again, the different ontological grounds between agents in organizations. This will also become a sticking point in think tanks developing an “ambivalence” towards academic work. Eventually showcasing think tanks becoming an intermediator towards the techno-scientific(the atomized and linear) arms of the government and how elites evaluate the value of “types of intellectual work”.
“Technoscientific reason”:
Within this he establishes five waves of “proto think tanks”: civic federalists, municipal research bureaus, foreign policy research groups and national economic management groups, with finally “defense” technocratic centers. The line of flight for the proto think tank is such: analysis of city and local politicians, businesses across local cities, national agents, politicians monetary spending, and finally the technological tools used in governmental organizations.
Autonomous Intellectuals:
Treated like a market, the regulation of “sociologists” and other relatively autonomous intellectuals in the political field was demarcated by the explosion of “heterogenous knowledge producers” in the political arena.
While it may seem that the gap between “true knowledge”(academically institutionalized knowledge, I might add) and politics with the rise of think tanks, the boundary lines between the two have actually increased.
The main thesis is that think tanks represent the subjugation of knowledge to political and economic demand. His historical precedent is the deimmunized testimony of the intellectual class within political affairs through the market affirmation and calcification of think tanks (as a class of political operatives working within a distinct topological terrain). As an aside, none of what I seek to add will diminish this thesis or the previous, as they are “accurate”. In the sense that the distinct objects and phenomena attributed throughout both texts are factually correct and ostensible.
Framing Devices:
Relationalism: rather than constructing any type of “typification” that assumes and leaves anything up to the imagination, Medvetz simply, discursively, showcases artifacts in relational origin. In this way, he doesn’t need to establish boundaries from the outset, it is only after the fact which the boundaries manifest themselves. Thinking of a topological field, there’s always a relation of points to other points, but the relationship of one set of points to another set might not be transitive between individual elements of each set: so that, point A in perspective to point A2 (between sets 1 and 2) will be different than point B to B2, as it isn’t strictly a linear relationship; furthermore if such were true then there would be no problem with establishing an intertransitive set consisting of points A, A2, A3, etc., regardless of historical and imperative precedent. He does this through “field thoery” where a field is defined only through a range of actors, not the range and perspective of all actors implicated.
Four Poles in “fields”: While he doesn’t set down a rule list, his identification of idioms, forms of capital, and so forth are all established on the same four fold relationships. There are intellectual, business, media, and political capital or polarized forms in a field. The goal and success of any think tank lies in a balancing of previous institutional boundary lines of “ideal types” of each of those four poles. In this way, we can think of think tanks as populating an “interstitial field” (one in which they operate in the gaps bounded by the very institutions they rely upon) that sets the domain of their polar identifiers.
Capital versus Language: Resisting an attempt at intuiting a theory of language, everything is thought up in terms of capital and its transfer. Within my particular linguistic tradition, that I’ve outlined in articles past: essentially is the maxim of the economical reproducibility of the sign amongst members of the community, and further how we can come to “gate keep” or qualitatively bound certain signs to their “correct” commemorative values.
Linguistic theory as a particular solution to think tank analysis:
In the big-man’s activity, the exchange of representations, in which the essential equality of the originary scene is maintained, no longer dictates an equivalent behavior with respect to the exchange of goods. […] [Things] and words no longer stand in the symmetrical relation of twin heirs of the originary event. […] [Only] dynamic thought-forms can provide post factum justification for a continually evolving social order.
- Eric Gans, Science and Faith pg. 41
What has stood as a problematic discussion (what exactly a think tank is) was eschewed within Medvetz’ work, however his delineation of why conservatives prevailed within society was lacking. He attributes it to the particular party and cultural values of America at the time; going further in the conclusion to talk about America’s “anti-intellectualism” or at least what we could deem a significant discussion.
While doing so gets at the heart of the issue—the role that historical significance and institutionally relevant categories do matter in why something is chosen (rather than?)—it is a rather weak analysis comparatively to the rest of the book’s framework. Of which, I (admittedly) enjoyed. No Mercy handles this issue with relative easy, despite its political affiliation(a diatribe on the evils traditionalism has held onto).
No Mercy, through the analysis of the particular tactics employed, demonstrates what Medvetz only can ascribe to as ‘a sign of the times’. In the sense of “how” agents and operatives within a specific field accomplish goals, the analysis by Stefancic and Delgado is superior.
As the quotation suggests, the origin of language, which we are forever commemorating just through the mere act of using language itself, originally had little to do with the difference between material and immaterial awareness. In fact, that was the entire point! Within the complexification of social orders we begin to develop a differentiation between material and symbolic gestures. Simply imagine any caricature of cavemen using language for the first time (it always is material). If we are to take this to its genetic origin, I can think of no greater divide than tradition and formal representation. Tradition is that which is institutionalized language, in the most abstract sense, while formal linguistic usage would be how we “are able” to use language.
By giving language an origin, a hypothetical event, we separate it from a reality in which language is not “created”. However, this creation is at once a paradox as it demands a creator which does not exist yet but is created, instantaneously within the same moment. When we imagine a semiotic, a value, or any typical representation of meaning within history we always divide it into these two categories. One: the formal act of linguistic usage as it is being done. Two: the “post factum” justification of its relationship within “pre-established” history. Creator and created.
When Medvetz talks about temporality, he uses it to demarcate the difference between political knowledge and academia. Academia, while autonomous, is related to a “universalistic”, or we shall say institutionalized, view on value; political think tanks otherwise are extremely immediate in their execution, e.g.: everything has a time limit to a politician who has to make a decision before Congress in an hour. This becomes much more coherent in the view not on institutions but the difference between small scale language use and the institutionalization of it. If we are to expand out definition of temporality to this difference between formal representational theories, then we can also expand it to the role that think tanks play in general. If the nature of all think tank work is closer to formal representation, is it not understandable that they would exist in between the “gaps” of the institutional boundary lines they depend on? And if we are studying the history (institutionalization) of think tanks, would it not make sense that the political party founded explicitly on implementing tradition into formal language would take hold as the largest force in the emergent field?
Rather than jumping through conceptual hoops, we can give a rather salient solution that doesn’t rest on historicisms, which while perhaps true are rather narrow in their theoretical applications. This prevalence, as No Mercy showcases, is decades long and isn’t simply a “sign of the times” but illustrative of conservative methodological implementation.
Furthermore, I can only see this as bolstering Medvetz critical argument that the explosion of think tanks, with their “own way of judging themselves”, as displacing academia’s role within politics. He uses this as the foundation of his inquiry, that he ends the book on, if it is a good thing that intellectual value is becoming increasingly dependent on economical and political demands. If we were to consider, once again, the difference between formal and institutional language, then establishing any particularism of academic value over political value is nonsensical and the question mute. Rather than being held in philosophical purgatory we can then pragmatically ask what really is the difference?
Secondarily, the discussions surrounding the “typology versus topology” can simply be attributed as anachronistic conceptions of agency. One in which we put forth a hypothetically predictable actor, who does everything we expect him to do(as being within language but unable to participate in any new commands, in essence not a human); and one in which we embark on a real-time archeological expedition within specific agents (who if we were to inquire could responsively act in kind to our provoking). In order to add a secondary definition to this theme, Medvetz will imply how little think tanks ‘actually get to choose the discussion’. In this sense, where giving a type of category to an actor subverts his agency, he has done exactly what he sets out against in the creation of a topology of actors in the first place(even if it does end up only being rhetorically hypocritical, and not ideologically). He amends this implication, to his credit, that think tanks themselves must be in a perpetual balancing act from all their capital sources (intellectual, material, etc.) and develop a type of agency in that way. In a rather hilarious simile, he likens it akin to a vaudeville act, where the audience is played by the actors playing for the audience. The scene is one in which he does the play and rushes to the stand to applaud himself, in rather knee slapping fashion.
As I said before, nothing is necessarily incorrect, but simply that the implementation of an explicit theory of language (as we seem to keep inching towards) would bring increased clarity and explanation. Hopefully, as I’ve demonstrated in an albeit small fashion, this is a fairly fruitful discussion. As you can see in this article, I’ve focused on the prevalence of a formal representation in the already over-complicated institutional landscape; next month we will be going on the flip side of the coin and discussing the general form of these institutional categories.
Some Remarks:
While I could write an entire diatribe, I am running on a bit of time crunch, and would only like to remark that I will try to ride this type of work into the ground. Been sick again, but am finally over it, more work to come, more confidently. I might put more dividers for aesthetics later on, but hopefully this isn’t too much of a pain to read. Apologies in advance, lads.
You and me in a dark lit room, baby…